Management of commercial real estate, such as apartment complexes, commercial office buildings, malls and other similar facilities, is a complex task. Property owner tasks, in addition to satisfying tenant needs, include managing building space inventory and tracking lease provisions. Satisfying the needs of tenants includes dealing with various vendors to make repairs and maintaining the property premises. Such repairs and maintenance range from emergencies to relatively mundane tasks like assigning and monitoring cleaning responsibilities and making repairs (e.g. changing a light bulb).
Heretofore, property management has been performed largely on a manual basis by the owner/landlord of a property or a management company employed by the owner. For example, if an employee of a tenant working in a room of a leased office space decides that s/he wants a repair, that person often directly calls the landlord or property manager for the repair. The employee also might call a vendor directly. Such calls are sometimes done without the approval of the person at the tenant with the authority to approve such repairs. These unauthorized calls result in wasted effort and a possible dispute over the responsibility for repair costs between the landlord and tenant. This could also result in costs to the landlord in making unnecessary repairs.
Problems also can arise in carrying out a repair assignment. For example, some buildings maintain and pay for their own repair personnel while others hire outside contractors or vendors to perform the work. In either case, the landlord property owner would like to effect the repair in the most efficient manner at the lowest cost by either utilizing its own personnel or hiring outside contractors on the most cost efficient basis.
Management problems become even more complex where the landlord property owner owns a number of properties in the same city or town or in different cities, states or countries. In such cases, the owner may wish to control or monitor, directly or through a property manager, management of some or all of the properties from a central location. This would provide the owner with more complete information as to the status of its properties and better control over management and costs.
Heretofore, no system has existed that provided a property owner or property manager with the capability to carry out the necessary management functions on a comprehensive basis using computer aided resources. In particular, a need exists to enable the property owner or property manager to integrate the management and information pool relating to a number of properties at various locations for analysis purposes.